PRODUCERS COULDN'T LET TOO MANY KIDS WIN.įogg told Great Big Story in 2016 there was a good reason only 30-odd teams wound up finishing the final obstacle course out of the show’s 120 episodes: Producers didn’t have the budget to award a grand prize to too many kids. But according to Fogg, the reason contestants had so much trouble with it is because they were trying to do it with the monkey facing away from them, a clock running out, and the threat of Guards always looming. Many a viewer has screamed at their television watching incompetent adolescents try to assemble the seemingly simple Silver Monkey: There are only three parts. THE SILVER MONKEY WAS DECEPTIVELY DIFFICULT. In addition to having to wait inside of a fake tree, the limbs cut into his arms and the entire room smelled like “three years’ worth of B.O.” (Foam rubber is not friendly to cast sweat.) 6. Temple Guard and stunt supervisor Michael Lupia told a Legends fan site that his least-favorite room in the Temple was the Dark Forest. By all accounts, no children were seriously harmed.) 5. (They also had a nurse on set in case any kids keeled over. The show eventually worked out the kinks, getting a shooting day down to a far more manageable 12 hours.
By the time of the Temple Run, the exhausted contestants were sobbing. Fogg told Albany’s WCDB Radio that their first contest took over 18 hours to shoot. In addition to the expected production hang-ups typical of any inaugural episode, Temple had the added stresses of an elaborate set and physical challenges that were difficult to coordinate.
THE FIRST EPISODE TOOK 18 HOURS TO SHOOT. When he wasn’t talking, Baker would kick back in the head and read a book or jump out and watch the stunts. As he spoke, he’d control the movement of the statue’s mouth with a lever. (The head's name was probably a nod to the Olmec, a civilization that predated the Maya and made giant stone heads.) According to Fogg, Dee Bradley Baker, the voice of Olmec, was actually inside of the 6-foot-tall head with a microphone and a script. One of Temple’s most memorable elements was the giant head of Olmec, a faux-stone carving that would narrate the proceedings and offer underwhelming advice to the contestants. Host Kirk Fogg told Buzzfeed that he was more or less picked at random out of a headshot catalog and asked to audition by reading some play-by-play from a teleprompter. PRODUCERS PICKED THE HOST ALMOST AT RANDOM.īeing a game show host takes a very unique skillset-though Nickelodeon and producers didn’t seem to care much about that one way or another. “I'm deathly afraid of things popping out of closets and doors.” Another contestant got so upset that she puked in the Pit of Despair. “I'm 31 and I can't go to haunted houses,” she said. One contestant named Keeli told in 2013 that the sight of a Guard bursting from a hidden compartment on set reduced her to tears. If a team was able to successfully pass the show’s first three rounds-which included answering trivia on the Steps of Knowledge and crossing a giant moat-they were “rewarded” with an obstacle course inside the Temple that was a confusing mass of puzzles, rooms, and Temple Guards that would pop out to terrify the tired children.